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Welcome to my reflecting corner for God's word and theology and any other funny stuff. I pray that, by the grace of God, through reading my blog, you will be touched by Him in understanding Jesus Christ more in your life.

Interesting Statistic on Dating

Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting study on the state of dating in America in 2014. This study (http://www.stateofdatingreport.com/) is jointly conducted by Christianmingle.com and Jdate.com. I will leave readers to figure out what these websites do. This is essentially a survey conducted on 2647 respondents from America on their views on dating. Certain interesting findings as below:

1. Age demographics
It is intriguing to note that 61% of the respondents are above 35 years old. The proportion was weighted down to 59% in the final report. I am just thinking if this reflects a trend of people in urban setting delaying their marriages or unable to find a life partner. It may very well be the case that among the pool of single people (being defined in the study as people who are currently unmarried, currently dating or planning to date in the near future or in an exclusive relationship with a partner for less than two years), this is the group of people who find it the most difficult to find a life partner, partly due to their age and other factors.

With regard to age preference, the result is not as surprising as it seems. In fact, it seems to corroborate with what I suspect for a very long time. Singles who are younger than 34 years old are less likely to shun people older than them compared to the time when they cross the 35 mark. The stats is more telling for women of all ages with an overwhelming response of 83% indicating that they prefer to date older men. The latter finding shows that women generally prefer older men but the older they get, the less chances they will find one as most of the older men will probably look for younger women. This is consistent with the findings found in the book: Changing Marriage Patterns in Southeast Asia.

For ideal age to be married, it is perhaps not surprising to see that most respondents indicated that it is best to be married before the age of 30. In fact this is consistent throughout all age groups and is definitely consistent with what some people have been telling me. There can possibly be many reasons for this but traditionally speaking, this may be the case that people of our forefathers' generations tend to marry young and this belief that one should marry young got subconsciously passed down.

2. Disappointment in Singlehood
It is noted while a total of 38% of respondents will be disappointed if they remain single for the rest of their lives. However, the younger group tends to have a higher percentage of respondents who will remain disappointed in their eternal singlehood. The probable reason for this may be because as one gets older, one gets resigned to their fate that they will remain single forever.

3. Keys to Successful Relationship
Probably this is one of the most interesting items in this very interesting study. The top three keys that were being identified were same race/ethnicity, same economic-socio background and similar religious background. However, it is also more intriguing to note that a higher proportion of men care about these keys than women. This may reflect the fact of demographic demand and supply, in a situation where men are in a choosing position more than women. Hence, because women can't afford to choose if they want to get hitched, they will need to forego some of these factors. This is very consistent with some of the stories I have heard, when women, because they need to get married, found men who are totally not their 'types' and ended up in unhappy marriage. This phenomenon is something which happens in church as well, as single girls are forced to look outside of their own circle because by forces of economics, there isn't just enough men to go around.

There are more things to mention from this study, but I shall stop here for now to read up on other stuff.

Addendum: I should probably caveat that the study was done in America and hence may reflect more on American than the population here in Asia. Nevertheless, some statistics do tally with the research done in this part of the world so far. Hence I think, after adjusting for cultural difference, there is still some insights that we can glean from the study.

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